Elon Musk’s X Corp. has escalated its years-long fight with the music business into an antitrust lawsuit, accusing the National Music Publishers’ Association and more than a dozen publishers — including the big three — of coordinating to force the platform into buying industrywide licenses at inflated rates.
Filed in federal court in the Northern District of Texas on Jan. 9, the complaint paints a picture of what X calls a “years-long campaign” to leverage collective market power. Named defendants include Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and a slate of independents such as BMG, Concord, Kobalt, Downtown, Reservoir, Anthem, Big Machine and Peermusic. X asks the court for damages, a permanent injunction and an order compelling individual negotiations with publishers.
What X is alleging
At the heart of X’s case is an allegation of collusion: that publishers and the NMPA agreed not to license compositions to X on competitive, one-off terms but instead pressured the platform into accepting industrywide deals at “supracompetitive” prices. X also claims the group weaponized the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by flooding the platform with takedown notices — a strategy X says was meant to manufacture “repeat infringers” and force high-profile user suspensions.
X argues that it has complied with the DMCA’s safe-harbor structure — removing content when notified and deplatforming repeat offenders — and that the publishers’ campaign nonetheless harmed the platform’s users and business by chilling content and depriving creators of reach.
The NMPA, whose president and CEO David Israelite has publicly criticized X for not licensing songs, views the suit differently. Israelite told reporters that X’s action was “a bad faith effort to distract from publishers’ and songwriters’ legitimate right to enforce against X’s illegal use of their songs.” The two sides have been entwined in litigation since 2023, when the NMPA first sued X over alleged mass copyright infringement.
Legal theories and stakes
X’s complaint advances antitrust and unfair-competition claims: essentially alleging a horizontal agreement among publishers to withhold individually negotiated licenses and thus extract monopoly rents. If the court accepts that framing, it could lead to an order forcing publishers to bargain separately with X — a potentially major change in how digital licenses are negotiated.
Publishers, for their part, rely on copyright law to demand payment for the use of musical compositions. In past disputes between rights holders and platforms, courts have had to balance DMCA safe-harbor protections for platforms against rights holders’ ability to police infringement. Here those two legal worlds — antitrust and copyright enforcement — collide.
The practical stakes are wide. A favorable ruling for X could lower the price of deals for platforms that want to host music and ease entry for new services. A win for publishers could reinforce the industry’s leverage to insist on blanket or cross-publisher agreements, keeping higher fees in place and possibly driving platforms to build more sophisticated content-filtering systems or accept higher licensing costs.
How we got here
The filing follows months of reported settlement negotiations; court filings earlier suggested the parties had made “very substantial progress toward settlement” but ultimately failed to reach an agreement. X says publishers rebuffed offers to sign individual licenses, and it frames the NMPA’s earlier threat to “inundate” the platform with takedowns as proof of an extortionate strategy.
Observers who follow digital-content fights see familiar themes: platform resistance to paying legacy-rights fees, creators’ interests caught in the middle, and trade groups leveraging regulatory and legal pressure to extract concessions.
That tension also shows up in adjacent corners of the audio ecosystem: platforms adding new features that change how people discover and share sound, or new disputes over synthetic audio and brand rights. For a look at how platforms are experimenting with audio distribution, see developments in Apple Podcasts’ recent feature updates. And the broader debate over rights and online content enforcement surfaced last year in discussions around AI tools and brand protections, as covered in the recent coverage of OpenAI’s Sora on Android.
What this could mean for users and creators
In practice, ordinary users might notice more aggressive takedowns, muted clips, or features that discourage posting copyrighted music — unless X reaches deals. Influential creators could face account risk if platforms and rights holders continue to clash over how to treat repeat notices. Advertisers and investors watch too: sustained content friction can dent engagement and ad revenues.
For songwriters and publishers, the lawsuit threatens to shift bargaining power. If X succeeds in court, publishers could be compelled to bargain individually — reducing their leverage. If the publishers prevail, platforms may be pushed toward paying for broad licenses or investing heavily in content ID and blocking tools.
The road ahead
Expect brisk litigation. Antitrust suits with copyright tangles tend to be fact-heavy and slow-moving: discovery will probe communications among publishers and the NMPA, takedown patterns, and licensing offers. The court’s rulings on preliminary injunctions, discovery scope and the interplay between DMCA procedures and antitrust law will shape the pace and possible settlement pressure.
Whichever way this turns, the case is likely to ripple beyond X. Judges and regulators are increasingly paying attention to how concentrated rights holders interact with major tech platforms — and this suit throws a bright light on those bargaining dynamics.
This is one chapter in a longer story about content, control and money on the internet. The next moves — filings, responses and any new negotiating overtures — will matter not just to X and the publishers named in the complaint, but to any service trying to host music and to the artists and audiences caught in the middle.